Success Story: CINTELLATE Pty Ltd

A propos

CINTELLATE produces leading edge software to manage Environment, Health, Safety and Risk related performance. Client Base: a wide variety of Government, Retail, Mining, Resources and Power producers across the globe.

Challenges

As our product became more sophisticated, and was being taken up by larger and larger clients, it was essential that the confidence in our product could be supported by hard evidence. CINTELLATE is a solid, reliable product, and we couldn’t afford to risk its reputation by assuming performance scalability.

Most tools required either too much investment in time or produced data for one particular element, requiring post testing manipulation to get a consolidated picture. Fast, re-creatable testing that truly loaded our application, while also being easy to manage, was our ultimate goal.

A smorgasbord of test tools was used with a dedicated pool of test machines. Testing was very hands on as some of the statistics could only be collected manually. The time to collate the reports at the end of the test cycle was often longer than the test itself, and differing recording scales and timeframes complicated this further.

Application tested: CINTELLATE is a Java Based Web Application serviced via Apache Tomcat. It stores data in an MSSQL or Oracle database and has a separate custom built Reporting engine and administrative tool set. As the load on the product is on the Web Application component, this is the primary focus of testing.

Protocols/technologies tested: http/https

Solution

NeoLoad natively produced a range of outputs that matched our requirements. These were configurable to our liking, and produced volumes of data that were even available during the testing. NeoLoad was also easy to configure to work with our product, where many had failed. An impressive short demonstration of user simulation against our product was utterly convincing and lived up to the claims.
We looked at a wide variety of products from many vendors and many price brackets (including open source), but NeoLoad stood out as a capable, value for money, clear winner.

We perform regular load testing as part of new releases (quarterly), and periodic testing when adding new features likely to impact performance. The nature of our client base has slowly transformed from medium size, low use, to large size, extreme use. Our first major testing was to validate our software under high user concurrency – for example, a typical client may only see a peak of 20 concurrent saves (to the millisecond), but our testing was to be at an unrealistic 1500 concurrent saves. This extreme testing is well beyond what our clients will experience, but it proved to be a useful tool to add efficiencies to our code that would have otherwise stayed undetected.

The major benefits from using NeoLoad:

Ability to accurately replicate high user load/concurrency;

Ability for real time monitoring meaning that failing tests could be abandoned early on;

Ability to modify existing tests without starting from scratch;

Fast startup (i.e. creation of tests) time.

From the first day the load identified weaknesses in code when the system is under duress. Once corrected we were able to gradually improve performance up to the desired level. It also gives us a benchmark for comparing future enhancements.

Résultats du test et valeur ajoutée

Without doubt NeoLoad has improved the quality and reliability of our product. It allows us to accurately scale our infrastructure to support a given number of users/transactions. It gives us confidence in responding to clients queries re performance while at the same time reducing our risk of placing the product inappropriately in an environment that would fail.

In the first major use of NeoLoad we identified 7 software issues and after correction of these were able to scale to up to 4 times the number of concurrent users.

NeoLoad is part of our product release cycle and will be used to validate performance against a baseline. Additionally, where significant new features are added, it will form part of the Development cycle.

Additional comments:

Overall, the quality of the product, the pre and post sales care and standard of technical support and documentation is of an extremely high standard. The choice to use NeoLoad has been a resounding success.